General · EdgepediaOctober 3, 20267 min read

Qissa (क़िस्सा)

Qissa (क़िस्सा; also released as Qissa: The Tale of a Lonely Ghost) is a 2013 Punjabi-language drama film directed and co-written by Anup Singh, in which a Sikh refugee from the 1947 Partition of India raises his fourth daughter as a son, with tragic consequences. It premiered at the 2013 Toronto International Film Festival and reached Indian cinemas on 20 February 2015.¹^•²

Key fact	Detail
Director and writers	Anup Singh, co-written with Madhuja Mukherjee³
Cast	Irrfan Khan as Umber Singh, Tillotama Shome as Kanwar, Tisca Chopra as Mehar, Rasika Dugal as Neeli³^•⁴
Language and length	Punjabi, 109 minutes³
Production	Four-way co-production: NFDC (India), Heimatfilm (Germany), Augustus Films (Netherlands), Ciné-Sud Promotion (France)¹^•²
Premiere and release	Toronto International Film Festival, September 2013; Indian theatrical release 20 February 2015¹^•²
Development time	Twelve years to raise financing, plus another year and a half to reach Indian cinemas²
Critical reception	89% on the Rotten Tomatoes Tomatometer from 18 reviews⁵

Spoilers

Story

The film follows Umber Singh, a Sikh who is forced to flee his village during the ethnic cleansing that accompanied the partition of India in 1947. He rebuilds a home for his family in Indian Punjab, but his longing for a male heir persists, and when his fourth and last-born child is another daughter he decides to raise the girl, Kanwar, as a son.³^•⁶ The crisis comes when Umber marries Kanwar to Neeli, a girl of lower caste, and the family is forced to confront the truth of their identities.³

Reviewers noted that the film does not depict the violence of Partition directly; it begins at the 1947 divide and follows the family's aftermath, with the narrative later moving between the real and the supernatural as Umber's story turns toward the ghostly.⁷^•⁴ Singh has described the film's theme as partition in every sense: of nations, of body and gender, of inner and outer truth, and of life and death.⁸

The qissa tradition

The title invokes the qissa, a story-telling form the director connects to Punjabi narrative tradition. Singh points to tales such as Heer Ranjha and Mirza Sahiba as celebrating the meeting of Sufi mysticism and local spiritual traditions, with journeys, meetings, and partings at their heart.⁶ A film scholar's account of post-Partition Lahore cinema likewise records that vernacular filmmakers drew on folk tales and legends in the qissa-dastan tradition, deploying mystical Sufism to fashion a distinctive local form.⁹ The Indian Express reviewer glosses the word as a yarn, a rambling tale told with threads loose enough to twine and separate as the storyteller wishes.¹⁰

Origins and personal history

Anup Singh was born and grew up in Dar es Salaam, Tanzania, to Indian parents. In 1972, when he was 13, Idi Amin's expulsion of Indians from Uganda set off xenophobia that forced Indian families in neighboring Tanzania to leave as well; Singh has called the journey from Dar es Salaam to Bombay his first passage into homelessness and a lifelong journey of a refugee.⁶ He studied literature and philosophy at the University of Mumbai, trained in direction at the Film and Television Institute of India in Pune, spent two decades in the United Kingdom, and later moved to Geneva, where he teaches in the cinema department of the Ecole Superieure Des Beaux Arts.²

The character of Umber Singh draws on Singh's grandfather, a Partition refugee who carried a lifelong resentment at the loss of his home and sometimes turned violently on his own family.⁶ A second seed was a story told to Singh by a relative whose teenage daughter jumped into a well when their village was attacked in 1947; the man said he dreamed of her every night, waiting in the well for him to come and save her.²^•⁶ Singh has said he wanted the film to keep the quality of such stories, which begin as traumatic memories and veer into the imaginary.⁶

Production

Raising money took twelve years. Singh spent about five years approaching producers in Mumbai; most liked the script but wanted the film made in Hindi with their own casting choices, terms he refused. The National Film Development Corporation (NFDC) was the only Indian production house that stayed with the project from almost the beginning, though it could offer only a minimum amount.²^•⁶ The breakthrough came through the German producers Bettina Brokemper and Johannes Rexin of Heimatfilm, joined by Thierry Lenouvel of Ciné-Sud Promotion in France and Bero Beyer of Augustus Films in the Netherlands, making four co-producers with the NFDC's Nina Lath Gupta.⁶ India Today's review called it the first movie shot under an Indo-German co-production.¹¹

German public support was substantial: the Film- und Medienstiftung NRW contributed 328,000 euros, with further funding from Eurimages, DFFF, FFA, and the Medienboard Berlin Brandenburg, and ZDF's Das Kleine Fernsehspiel on board in cooperation with Arte.¹ The crew numbered 140 people of multiple nationalities, speaking French, Dutch, German, Punjabi, Hindi, and English on set; the cinematographer was the German Sebastian Edschmid.²

Shooting took place in Punjab: Singh searched for the village his grandfather described, found in Rawalpindi, Pakistan, and settled on a village near the Wagah border whose red Nanakshahi bricks matched his memory. The main house was an old government kothi, with further shooting outside Chandigarh, at Attari, and in Himachal Pradesh.²

Visual approach and censorship

Singh designed the film's light so that light and darkness are not antagonistic: human figures and nature hold equal power, characters emerging from dark into light rather than being separated from their backgrounds as in most popular cinema. Colors are saturated but deeply muted, moving from browns and reds to yellow to purple and back as the drama develops.²^•⁶

Anticipating trouble with India's Central Board of Film Certification, Singh shot an alternative to a pivotal scene of Kanwar's emotional breakdown so the board would have no reason to cut the original and disrupt the film's rhythm. Even so, the board blurred a bare back shown during a bathing scene, a decision Singh criticized as making the image more insidious.²

Release and reception

Releasing the film in India proved difficult. After the Toronto premiere in September 2013, it took another year and a half to reach Indian cinemas, opening on 20 February 2015 in select cities including Mumbai, Delhi, Chandigarh, Chennai, and Kolkata, with a simultaneous video-on-demand and DVD release on cinemasofindia.com.² Singh attributed the difficulty partly to the film being in Punjabi and partly to a mainstream notion of entertainment that left little room for films rooted in a cultural language.⁶

Critical reception was largely positive. Rotten Tomatoes recorded an 89% Tomatometer from 18 reviews.⁵ The Hindustan Times gave it 4.5 out of 5, praising Irrfan Khan's performance as one of the most difficult characters he had played and calling the film dastaangoi, storytelling in the qissa-dastan mode.⁴ The Indian Express rated it 3.5 out of 5, finding the film lambent and seductive up to its turn toward the paranormal, and singling out the rustic Punjabi dialogue and the performances of Shome and Dugal.¹⁰ The Hollywood Reporter's reviewer found the final leap into the paranormal an odd denouement for a narrative centered on gender-based violence.⁵ Reviewers repeatedly identified Khan's performance, the cinematography, and the film's treatment of gender, patriarchy, and displacement as its defining strengths.¹²

Place in Singh's work and Partition cinema

Qissa is Singh's second feature, following The Name of a River (Ekti Nadir Naam), a Bengali-language homage to the filmmaker Ritwik Ghatak, whom Singh regards as his teacher.¹³^•⁶ Like the first film, it is a tale of loss and displacement set against the Partition of India, but in a more direct and darker register.¹³ The Caravan interview placed it alongside Ghatak's Meghe Dhaka Tara in the lineage of Partition-themed Indian art cinema.⁶

References

Topic: Encyclopedia › Arts and culture › Screen and stage › Film and television › Films and standalone screen works › Individual films by title and year › Indian films (individual works) › Films in other Indian languages

Initially written Oct 3, 2026 · Reviewed: Oct 25, 2026 · Edited: Oct 15, 2026; Oct 25, 2026; Nov 1, 2026 · Last review: Oct 25, 2026

Notice something wrong?